IBM responds to Microsoft: OOXML is “technically inferior”

Microsoft fired the latest salvo in the increasingly antagonistic document standards debate last week when the company accused IBM of orchestrating efforts to block ISO fast-track approval of Office Open XML (OOXML), a document format devised by Microsoft for its office software suite. IBM isn't taking the accusations sitting down, however, telling Ars that Microsoft is leading a fight against truly open standards.

As governments around the world begin to establish IT procurement policies that favor open standards, the stakes in the document format dispute are rising. The trend towards mandatory standards adoption in government IT has led some to speculate that government agencies and companies that work closely with the public sector will begin to turn away from Microsoft's deeply entrenched office offerings, instead adopting alternatives like IBM's Lotus Notes, Sun's StarOffice, or OpenOffice.org which use the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Microsoft has been seeking ISO approval for its own OOXML format in order to ensure that its software remains competitive.

Citing technical and intellectual property issues, a growing number of critics believe that Microsoft's standards are flawed, restrictive, not adequately aligned with existing standards, or not conducive to broad third-party support. They argue that Microsoft should adopt ODF rather than fragmenting the office document space with its own alternative. Microsoft disagrees with much of the criticism and contends that OOXML is necessary because ODF lacks support for features that are used in Microsoft Office and cannot be adapted to provide clean backwards-compatibility with documents that are already in Microsoft's binary formats.

The ISO evaluation process for OOXML has been mired in controversy and has been transformed into a battleground for competing corporate agendas. Microsoft, IBM, and other participants have been accused of using exploitative political maneuvering to manipulate the standards process to their own advantage. A ZDNet article published late last month quotes Microsoft officials who claim that IBM is solely responsible for ISO's recent decision to deny OOXML fast-track approval. "Let's be very clear," Jean Paoli, Microsoft's senior director of XML technology, told ZDNet. "It has been fostered by a single company—IBM. If it was not for IBM, it would have been business as usual for this standard."

"They have made this a religious and highly political debate," said Nico Tsilas, Microsoft's senior director of interoperability and IP policy. "IBM have asked governments to have an open-source, exclusive purchasing policy. Our competitors have targeted this one product—mandating one document format over others to harm Microsoft's profit stream."

Tsilas makes some dubious arguments that don't accurately reflect in entirety the reality of the situation. For instance, there is no legitimate basis for the claim that IBM is lobbying for governments to adopt open-source exclusive procurement policies or that ODF is a single-product standard. The OpenDocument format can be implemented in proprietary or open software and it can be implemented by anyone, including Microsoft, so government adoption of ODF only has the potential to harm Microsoft's profit stream if Microsoft keeps refusing to support the format. IBM shouldn't be blamed for Microsoft's reluctance to adopt existing standards.

IBM: Microsoft is engaging in "bad behavior"

We spoke to Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source for IBM, who responded to Microsoft's recent claims regarding IBM's involvement in the OOXML dispute. "IBM believes that there is a revolution occurring in the IT industry, and that smart people around the world are demanding truly open standards developed in a collaborative, democratic way for the betterment of all," Sutor told Ars. "If 'business as usual' means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like OOXML on the IT industry, we're proud to stand with the tens of countries and thousands of individuals who are willing to fight against such bad behavior.

"In particular, we congratulate those countries who have already voted against OOXML in the JTC1 ballot, and the many more who we believe are now considering doing the same," Sutor concluded.

In the past, we have seen plenty of evidence that both Microsoft and IBM have resorted to politicking in the standards debate, but it seems disingenuous for Microsoft to lay the blame for ISO's decision solely on IBM. In light of the complexity of Microsoft's format, even some of Microsoft's supporters assert that more time is needed for detailed evaluation so that relevant problems in OOXML can be identified and resolved.

Critics of Microsoft's format of choice continue to raise all sorts of significant technical issues with OOXML, ranging from use of nonstandard locale conventions to the inclusion of inaccurate date computation behavior for the sake of backwards compatibility. Critics also note that numerous OOXML content examples in the specification itself fail to validate against the XML schema supplied by Microsoft. These are all issues that can be addressed by ISO now that fast-track approval has been shot down.

Regardless of the outcome of the standards debate, Microsoft's format will quickly become the de facto standard in private industry as companies adopt Office 2007. In the long run, a more rigorous inspection of OOXML is advantageous, because it could potentially bring improvements to the format that wouldn't have happened otherwise. As a result of this protracted approval process, organizations that adopt OOXML will be able to do so with greater confidence than would be possible if Microsoft had been permitted to railroad it through fast-track approval without this scrutiny.